"I'm writing to inform you that the release team discussed Drop or Fix Fallback Mode yesterday. We've come to the conclusion that we can't maintain fallback mode in reasonable quality, and are better off dropping it." Gnome-fallback has been my refuge, as I find both Unity and Gnome 3's shell unusable. Yes, we have been warned this would happen. I thought the cost of maintaining gnome-panel would be so low that it might never need to happen. But as it appears, it is deemed necessary. As for me, I'm bound for something Qt, as I am very angry at Gnome for abandoning its 'classic' users.

Thanks, that's helpful. Chances are some of your issues will be (or have already been) addressed.

- Manual icon positioning on desktop seems to work fine here. Did you encounter any bugs or were you simply using an older version of Xfce?

- Xfce doesn't come with a Gnome clock and it does some things differently (more often than not, that's good). Weather reports are in a Weather plugin. A worldclock indeed is missing (thank you for the suggestion), but you can add several Orage clocks each set to a different time zone - I'm using this method myself.

- Volume control (a mixer plugin) has recently been improved but I still prefer Xubuntu's sound indicator. Not sure what you mean by "over 100%" output volume (is it some sort of a workaround for a bug elsewhere?)

Of course, there will always be Gnome2 or Ubuntu applets/indicators which are not in Xfce and often there is no reason to duplicate the effort. For these applets you can use an XfApplet plugin (works with Mate's applets) or an Indicator plugin (currently works with Gtk2 indicators).